2025-05-23 Project Updates meeting

Meetings
1

Attendees: Brecht Van Lommel, Clément Foucault, Dalai Felinto, Falk David, Fiona Cohen, Hans Goudey, Jacques Lucke, Jeroen Bakker, Nathan Veghdal, Sybren Stüvel, Thomas Dinges

Projects

  • Hair Dynamics
  • NPR
    Viewport
  • Online Assets Library
  • Project Setup
  • Texture mitmapping
  • VSE Story Tools
  • Vulkan
  • UV Sync

Hair Dynamics (Jacques / Hans)

  • Not many updates. Jacques and Hans have mostly been focused on other things. Lukas has been working a bit on volume grids which is required by simulations.
  • Planning to start work again on that project next week
  • This week, Lukas met with Rik, Simon and Julien to discuss the need for hair improvements for Project Storm (character).

NPR (Clément)

  • Published the blog post and design tasks.
  • Sub tasks will still need design time
  • Planning wise: probably starting work on the NPR project in Q3 or Q4 2025

Viewport (Clément)

  • Most targets for 4.5 are in:
    • Non-blocking shader specialization is in!
      • Fixed freeze caused by Material Preview job (now fully async)
    • Fixes stutters when starting EEVEE caused by excessive specialization.
    • Shader and Material compilation backend refactor is in!
      • Cleanup a lot of technical debt.
      • Give some speedup of EEVEE scene loading on OpenGL.
      • Allows for fully non-blocking EEVEE startup (PR coming soon).
  • Initial investigation about optimizing high instance count was done:
    • Speeding up DupliList generation is being worked on.
    • There is discussion about other changes to the Draw module.
    • Project might be moved to 5.0 given the scope and the time constraints.
  • Upcoming: bug fixing, and preparing plan for 5.0

Online Assets Library (Sybren)

  • HTTP downloader is a bit delayed (Python’s multiprocessing tools also use Python threads themselves, which are unstable in Blender).
    • Sybren worried about how unknown this info is, updated documentation.
  • Asset Browser side of things progressing nicely.

Project Setup (Nathan)

  • Finished up and landed Path Template documentation in the user manual.
    File Paths - Blender 4.5 Manual
  • Fixed some misc bugs that I discovered in my own testing.
  • Path template errors PR (show all errors in the UI, not just syntax errors) is now ready for review: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/138679
    Would be nice to get this landed for 4.5 if we can, since it rounds out the Path Templates feature.
  • Next will be adding more variables, then exploring implementation of the next phase, “Project UI + Project awareness”.

Cycles Texture Cache (Brecht)

  • Early prototype shows memory reduction.
  • Next is cancelling shader execution on cache miss and tx file creation workflow.
  • Not much progress in the last weeks, hoping to get back to it when 4.5 targets and volume scattering are reviewed.

VSE Story Tools (Falk)

  • Not much happened since the last meeting. The prototype has given us enough insight to foresee the potential issues. Mostly, this is about duplicated output settings and render options (leads to confusion).
  • There is a proposal on how to rework the output settings to improve the situation once sequences would get introduced.
  • Questions from Falk: Not sure how to proceed, what’s next for the project. Has been focused on Grease Pencil for the 4.5 release since there are some important topics left.
    • Dalai: We need to arrive at a final decision regarding separating the sequence from the scene (using camera settings) or double-down on having the sequence as part of the scene.

Vulkan (Jeroen)

  • Focus on bug fixing and improvements.
  • OpenXR performance isn’t where it should be (#138977).
    • A new approach is being worked on but could slide to 5.0 as it requires specific configurations for different setups.
  • Next step is to reduce spec violations. Qualcomm has asked us to focus on them. There are not many, but driver engineers only fix issues when there are none.
  • Collecting and researching targets for Blender 5.0 (#138817).
  • The plan is to switch to Vulkan as the default backend in 5.0 alpha (for non-macOS systems).

UV Sync (Campbell)

  • Most functionality is working on a user level with positive user feedback from test builds.
  • Next steps are mostly tying up loose ends as well as topics outside typical usage:
    • Make feature-complete.
    • Make a decision for “island” selection mode (currently unsupported).
    • Improve selection API, some optimizations.
    • Python API: Check on how existing scripts that adjust selection should be updated (or handle this automatically).
    • Python API: Support selection from Python that maintains UV/Viewport synchronization.
    • Document flushing selection between UV’s / Viewport.
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